They are difficult to reach, have hardly been studied scientifically, and their existence does not fit into current geological models: the Marie Byrd Seamounts off the coast of Antarctica present many riddles to volcanologists. ...

A thorough examination of tiny crystals of zircon, a mineral found in rhyolites, an igneous rock, from the Snake River Plain has solidified evidence for a new way of looking at the life cycle of super-volcanic eruptions in ...

Although long thought to be devoid of life, the bottom of the deep ocean is now known to harbor entire ecosystems teeming with microbes. Scientists have recently documented that oxygen is disappearing from seawater circulating ...

Water found in ancient Moon rocks might have actually originated from the proto-Earth and even survived the Moon-forming event. Latest research into the amount of water within lunar rocks returned during the Apollo missions ...

UC Santa Cruz hydrogeologist Andrew Fisher is leading an expedition on the research vessel (R/V) Atlantis this summer to explore fluid flow and microbial habitats deep within the ocean crust. His team is returning to a set ...

Colombia sits atop a complex geological area where three tectonic plates are interacting, producing seismicity patterns that have puzzled seismologists for years. Now seismologists have identified the "Caldas tear," which ...

An international team of scientists has embarked on a shipboard expedition to study how the Earth's crust was pulled apart in an area beneath the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain. The team includes geophysicists from ...

Crustacean

Thylacocephala?
Branchiopoda

Remipedia
Cephalocarida
Maxillopoda

Ostracoda

Malacostraca

Crustaceans (Crustacea) form a very large group of arthropods, usually treated as a subphylum, which includes such familiar animals as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill and barnacles. The 50,000 described species range in size from Stygotantulus stocki at 0.1 mm (0.004 in), to the Japanese spider crab with a leg span of up to 12.5 ft (3.8 m) and a mass of 44 lb (20 kg). Like other arthropods, crustaceans have an exoskeleton, which they moult to grow. They are distinguished from other groups of arthropods, such as insects, myriapods and chelicerates, by the possession of biramous (two-parted) limbs, and by the nauplius form of the larvae.

Most crustaceans are free-living aquatic animals, but some are terrestrial (e.g. woodlice), some are parasitic (e.g. fish lice, tongue worms) and some are sessile (e.g. barnacles). The group has an extensive fossil record, reaching back to the Cambrian, and includes living fossils such as Triops cancriformis, which has existed apparently unchanged since the Triassic period. More than 10 million tons of crustaceans are produced by fishery or farming for human consumption, the majority of it being shrimps and prawns. Krill and copepods are not as widely fished, but may be the animals with the greatest biomass on the planet, and form a vital part of the food chain. The scientific study of crustaceans is known as carcinology (alternatively, malacostracology, crustaceology or crustalogy), and a scientist who works in carcinology is a carcinologist.